Affirmations - Really Feel It; Watch Out for Worry
Author: Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami
Description: Affirmations: Incorporate feeling. Think, visualize, feel. Worry: Consider reasonable opinions, choose and visualize a plan. Place well chosen impressions into the subconscious mind to create a specific future. Everything that happens is created by you; there is no external, it's the effect. The cause is what you put into your subconscious. The subconscious is a magnet attracting people and events. We create situations to learn from them. Master Course, Merging With Siva, Lesson 74.
Transcription:
Good morning.
Lesson 74 from Merging With Siva:
"Utilizing the Power of Feeling
"An antidote to this is to use affirmations in this way. Repeat the affirmation, 'All my needs will always me met,' and feel how it is to feel after all of your needs have been met. Until you find this feeling, you should not expect the affirmation to work. Every time that you have a need and that need is met, a certain feeling is then produced in you. That same feeling you have to feel the very instant you speak the affirmation. You then open a channel that instant to your own intuition through which all good comes. In this state of mind one has inspiration and will. It is from the intuition that, at the eleventh hour, fifty-ninth minute, fifty-ninth second, every need is met."
Gurudeva is pointing out that in the practice of affirmations we have to make sure to incorporate this idea about feeling. So we have to feel now how we will feel in the future when the event we want to have happen has happened. So that can take some imagination. But, it's important. And as I usually say when I do presentation on affirmations, it's sometimes left out. It's not thought about but it's an important aspect of affirming something.
"The next time you have complete feelings from the innermost sources of your being that your every need will be met, quietly repeat that affirmation over again. 'All my needs will always be met.' Simultaneously think, visualize and feel deeply with an inner, all-encompassing knowing that each need will be met. This is the esoteric secret of making an affirmation work."
When I give a keynote on this I have a separate slide for each one: Think, Visualize, Feel. Just to make sure the three points are grasped.
Think means we can't be repeating the affirmation and be doing something else in our mind at the same time. Which is easy to do if you repeat an affirmation every day for a month; find after a while it's easy to start planning your day in the middle of the affirmation. And doing the affirmation and doing something else with your mind, it's easy. The mind likes to do more than one thing at a time, you know. Finds it, life more interesting. But if you do that you divide the mental power and you're not focusing on what the words mean.
So, think means you're actually focusing on what the words mean. "All my needs will always be met." Not repeating it with the mind somewhere else. You're focusing on "All my needs," you have the mind something there, "will always be met." You have the mind something there. Two ideas. "All my needs will always be met." We think about it.
Visualization can be anything but it should be a specific visualization that you create to match the affirmation. Picture in your mind a visualization. Now: "All my needs will always be met." You're going to have in mind something simple. Food, for example. You'll always have plenty of food. So, "All my needs will always be met." You see an abundance of food in the kitchen. Simple way of visualizing that. "All my needs will always be met." I always have an abundance of food. Never be short of food. Then you change it to something else.
"All my needs will always be met." You have enough money in some form. "All my needs will always be met." You have enough staff to help you out in some form.
So, you can change the visualization, I'm suggest that because it's easy for a visualization to again become a habit and you don't really pay attention to it. But as you change it every month, if you're doing this affirmation say for a year: "All my needs will always be met, " you can change your visualization every month. Then it gives the affirmation more energy then if you keep doing the same one on and on and on.
Feeling we talked about; so you have to do all three. You think about what it means; you have a visualization and you feel now how you will feel when it happens. If you combine all of that in your repetition of the affirmation, that's what Gurudeva says is the esoteric secret of making an affirmation work.
"People say affirmations work for them but sometimes they do not. Why do affirmations only work sometimes? It is because the subconscious is receiving the affirmation at a psychological moment, and a greater knowing, visualization and feeling has been awakened to some extent. However, at the times when an affirmation did not work, there was no knowing, no visualization or feeling attached to it. Just words. When affirmations are repeated over and over again without feeling or visualization, occasionally negative results are produced, as the vibrations of the words themselves may not register what is intended in the subconscious."
Affirmations are useful in terms of worry. Worry is a common state of mind we end up in for one reason or another. A small worry, a big worry. I remember a few years ago a young couple was worried about running out of oil. Peak oil. I hadn't ever had that worry. So, it seemed strange to me. You know, it was a worry I'd never had. And it was a big worry to them and the whole society, the whole of society was going to crumble here and fall apart. Rising sea levels. We could worry about that.
So, there's a number of aspects of dealing with worry. And the first one is to pin down if it's a real concern or not. Because the mind has a habit of remembering the negative news and forgetting the positive news. That's why you see negative news in the headlines. We hear about everybody who got murdered, everybody who got robbed and we don't hear about all the good deeds that were done in the same community. So we want the, like the negative news. So, have to make sure the negative news is, is really factual. Not just take one person's opinion. You know, check it out. Get a number of opinions from what you would call balanced or moderate positions.
For example: On rising sea level. That's a worry if you own property on the ocean. Is it going to happen or not? Well the, I looked at a few opinions and I chose what I consider a moderate or conservative opinion which is the U.S. Corp of Engineers, right? You'd think they'd be a pretty conservative group. Not fanatical. They're engineers and they're in the armies. But, they're responsible for many airports and other facilities around the country. And so they have to take into account in terms of what they're building that's new, and what they're protecting that exists: Rising sea levels. So they came out with a statement. A reasonable expectation for seal level rise at the end of the century is two meters. It's about 6 feet.
So, I use that as my guideline. I chose what I considered is a reasonable opinion on the matter. Not an extreme opinion or someone who denies it's happening but an opinion in the middle. So, you need an opinion in the middle. And then you have to decide: Should I worry about this? We're at 400 feet here, right. Six feet; we're okay. We don't have a worry. But, the road that goes by Coco Palms, you know, that might be in trouble.
So we're okay at 6 feet rise. So it settles the mind to choose an opinion. But then you don't want to worry. You need a plan. If that is actually going to impact you in some way, you know, if you have a residence that's actually going to be impacted by 6 foot rise in water you need a plan to handle that. Do you want to sell it in the next 50 years? Do you just want to live there and let the water come up? You know, what are you going to do? You have to make a plan. So, if you're worried about something, a good response is to choose a conservative opinion and then make a plan to adjust to it.
And then to, once you have a plan, you can use visualization to achieve the plan. But, you can't use visualization if you don't have a plan. If you're just worried, you don't have a plan; you can't use this technique of visualization, it's just not there. So you take a worry, settle it with a moderate opinion that's in the middle, then make a plan based on that opinion. And then use a visualization to help achieve the plan. That is a good approach.
There's a related aphorism that I bring in the keynote on this. From "Cognizantability" it's the seventeenth aphorism. " The conscious mind creates the future by what has gone before, through it's subconscious. Should memory be weakened due to abusive practices, its creations are distorted." Well that's, affirmations is an example of that. Conscious mind creates the future by what has gone before, through the subconscious. So, what goes into the subconscious mind creates our future.
Affirmations is a way of putting in a very well chosen impression in the subconscious mind to create a specific future. But everything we put into the subconscious mind contributes toward our future. So some things are fairly haphazard which creates a future which is not totally smooth.
The point I wanted to make is: One of the common perspectives on life is "Things are happening to me." Seems like our life is out of control. All these things are happening to me and they're happening because of external reasons. So this person doesn't like me. You know, this person we had the problem a few years ago and there's this and there's that. And then there's rising sea levels. We're running out of oil. You know, all these things are happening to me. Out of my control. And external to me.
This is taking the opposite point of view and saying everything that happens to you is being created by you. Isn't that an interesting thought? There is no external. Everything that happens is being created by you. The external only responds to what you put into your subconscious. It's not the cause; it's the effect. That make sense? The cause is what you put into your subconscious. What you thought, what you did. How you reacted to something. All that goes in the subconscious. That's the cause. What's happening on the outside is only the effect. But we tend to think the other way. We think what's happening outside is the cause and our reaction to it is the effect. So we're backwards.
So this is trying to help us redefine cause and effect. Understand what I mean? So the cause is what went into our mind in the past and what's happening outside is the effect of what went into our mind. Therefore if we want to change what happens to us on the outside we have to change what we put into our mind which is the cause.
So affirmations is one way of doing that. Worry is another way of doing that obviously. As Gurudeva says, you know: If you worry enough about something you'll cause it to happen, right? Remember that in the Master Course? Just worry enough about it; you're just impressing your mind. Do that enough for enough years you, finally it happens. And you say: "I knew it was going to happen." No, it wasn't going to happen; you made it happen by impressing it in your mind so much, right?
So you get the idea. We want to change, it's you know, it's a beautiful, an important point, right? We want to change our concept of cause and effect. What's happening outside is not the cause and our reaction to it is not the effect. What happened, what we put into our subconscious mind is the cause and we're attracting individuals and events to fulfill that. Subconscious is a magnet: it attracts the people and the events that you told it to attract by what you thought, by what you did, by what you remember.
So we want to change that and therefore our perspective on life; we feel more in control and we can laugh at things. Somebody mistreats us, something goes wrong and we say: Boy, what did I do in the past to create that? Instead of getting mad at the person. You know, we start to internalize the cause. What did I do to make that mess happen? You know, and you might actually understand what you did. You might have an insight into your own karmic pattern. You say: Oh I must have done something like that to create this.
Cause we create situations to learn from them. That's the point. How do we learn? By creating situations and learning from them. We'll keep creating the same situations until we finally learn from them. So if we want to move on to a new pattern we have to learn what we're creating is trying to teach us. If we don't learn from it then we keep repeating it. And if we don't; if we look at it and blame the other person then we don't even have a chance to learn from it cause we just, we're externalizing the cause of it.
You have to say: Well I am the cause of this; why did I create this?
So we create many things to learn something from it and we keep creating them until finally we learn it and then, then that knowledge helps us not create that again, cause we've finally learned the lesson from it.
Okay, you get the idea.
Have a wonderful day.